IN-SEN: Brains or Braun?

[IceSpear]

Does anyone else have a hard time telling Messer and Rokita apart?

mike braun literally did an ad about this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvKHqChRrYg

probably the best republican ad i've seen this cycle

I'm genuinely pretty worried about Braun winning the primary.

I have faith in the Republican primary electorate's finely attuned ability to select the worst possible candidate.

https://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/state.php?fips=18&year=2016&f=0&off=3&elect=2

[IceSpear]

Suddenly Andrew wants to give rational analysis and consider the bigger picture when a poll shows good news for a Democrat, when we all know if it had Donnelly down 20 he'd be the first one declaring him doomed.

[IceSpear]

https://www.rollcall.com/news/politics/gop-poll-donnelly-in-position-to-win-in-indiana

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Donelley will win in 2018 and Braun is overrated. Nobody cares about candidate quality as long as Trump is president

Not like they cared about candidate quality before Trump was president either. Proof: Trump is now president.

[IceSpear]

Suddenly Andrew wants to give rational analysis and consider the bigger picture when a poll shows good news for a Democrat, when we all know if it had Donnelly down 20 he'd be the first one declaring him doomed.

“Donnelly down by 20 in IN-03. This goes against the rising numbers in the GCB for Democrats.”

First of all, his name isn't Andrew.

Secondly, while the IN-03 numbers look good for Donnelly, polling of individual districts can be really imprecise, and this is a secondary question in one poll for one district. It doesn't change my perception of the race as a tossup. If the Senator were that well-positioned, Id like to see it in a statewide poll.

Obviously one individual district poll isn't super reliable. The entire point was that Andrew would not care about these concerns and would treat it as gospel if it showed bad news for Donnelly rather than good news.

[IceSpear]

Irrelevant anecdote, but my friend from Indiana (Hamilton County) was a Romney/Donnelly/Gregg voter in 2012 and didn't vote at all in 2016. She said she's hearing a lot of ads attacking Donnelly for voting against "middle class tax cuts" on the radio. She said she'll be voting for Donnelly and reminding all her friends to vote as well. She's very anti-Trump.

Very caricaturish indeed.

[IceSpear]

He enables war criminals and is complicit in the erosion of our fundamental civil liberties. I would rather have Rand Paul representing me than authoritarian, war mongering trash like Donnelly.

Are people here still pretending Rand Paul is some kind of maverick? I must have teleported 4 years back in time.

[IceSpear]

He enables war criminals and is complicit in the erosion of our fundamental civil liberties. I would rather have Rand Paul representing me than authoritarian, war mongering trash like Donnelly.

Are people here still pretending Rand Paul is some kind of maverick? I must have teleported 4 years back in time.

The level of whataboutism and excessive hyperbole that some of these green avatars go to sometimes to justify their “centrism/#bothsides” schtick is absurd

He has a Barbara Lee sig which seems to suggest he's a true leftist and not a centrist, which makes support for Rand Paul over Donnelly even more hilarious.

[IceSpear]

Well it’s kind of a poll but Politico has an article on the race and both sides internals have that race “essentially tied”. So nothing seems to have changed from Braun +1 https://www.politico.com/story/2018/08/13/joe-donnelly-indiana-senate-midterms-2018-772506

That's reassuring actually.

[IceSpear]

Wow. Check out Mexico Joe's latest ad:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=29&v=VmD8fYF4Rzg

It's clear he's down bigly to Mike Braun if he's putting up overtly pro-Trump ads.

Cringe, Manchin has done something similar too, oh well, they have free pass cards to do anything to win, so do what's necessary ma bois.

What a poorly done ad. The part in the middle where Donnelly flimsily talks into the camera from driving the RV is just LOL

You can tell that was filmed in Indiana too because he kept hitting potholes every couple of seconds

LOL

[IceSpear]

Regardless of the result, this will be the first real high-quality poll of the race post-primary.  I don't even remember if we had a high-quality poll pre-primary; but knowing Indiana's polling laws probably not.  Whatever we get will probably be our first real indication of where the race stands.

Personal opinion, but if Donnelly is behind by any more than two points then I don't see how he'd make up the deficit by election day as an incumbent.

We never got a decent poll for this race. In fact, we've only gotten 3 polls total throughout all of 2017 and 2018. Gravis, SurveyMonkey, and Trafalgar. lol

[IceSpear]

inb4 "Braun is a recruitment fail/the worst Republican challenger of the cycle"

He’s not. He was clearly better than the hacks he beat... but by beating those hacks people overrated his strength a little, I think

I wonder what this poll would've shown if Donnelly was up against Rokita. The GOP might have started considering triage, lol.

[IceSpear]

Why do the Libertarians often do so well in Indiana? I scoffed at the Lib candidate getting 8% in this poll. But I noticed they've gotten over 5% in each of the last three IN Senate races.  So it's not totally implausible.

This is a good question. Indiana isn't exactly a state you'd expect to be libertarian friendly, but they consistently do oddly well in the Senate races there. It also seems confined to the Senate races for some reason, they usually get a much lower number in the gubernatorial races.

Maybe our resident Indiana libertarian can answer this?

[IceSpear]

The fact that I had to go back to page seven on this board to find this thread says a lot about this race.  No one is talking about it.  I really get the feeling there is no enthusiasm at all for Braun; which leaves Donnelly is a good position as Democrats are motivated to turn out this season no matter what.

The lack of quality polling does have me uneasy on this race though.

---
Edit:

I've dug through a lot of the crosstabs on the polls and they don't really give me a lot of faith in Donnelly.

He's averaging well under 45% in most of the polls and I don't really see why there would be a late break for him, but can see a million reasons why late deciders who just go from Braun with Trump's approval rebounding at the end of the cycle.

Yeah, Donnelly could certainly win in a big Democratic wave, but I doubt he survives even a slight GOP overperformance, and I don’t get why people think he’s underrated or that the race is Lean D (or Likely D, if you trust 538's "model"). A Braun win would hardly be an upset.

538 still has Heitkamp more likely to win than Braun, lol. Their trashdamentals are a joke.

[IceSpear]

The Indiana Democratic Party seems to be giving the Florida Democratic Party a run for its money in terms of ineffectiveness.

John Zody needs to be fired like yesterday.

And Donnelly was a fool for hiring Peter Hanscom as campaign manager.  No one should hire him for anything again.  

I canvassed for Democrats in Indianapolis. They are a hot mess.

I compared the 2012 results to this year's.  Turnout in Lake and Marion was abysmal, and Donnelly lost ground in many places he won six years ago.  Looking at the numbers in St. Joseph County, they were awful for him.  I wouldn't be surprised if he ends up losing his old congressional district (both the current gerrymandered one and the one that he served before the Senate).

"I'm voting for the local Democrats, but I'm really not sure about Donnelly," was a common refrain I heard, when not getting the door slammed in my face by the Former Democrats of Speedway.

Ouch.  Was Kavanaugh a factor, or was it the onslaught of "I'm not like those Crazy Democrats" commercials?

Donnely really should have seen the writing on the wall and tried to win hamilton county instead of those rurals. That would have been the only way to win. Instead Donnely probably turned those voters off with immigration rhetoric.

Yeah, I agree. It's telling that Donnelly ended up doing worse than McCaskill. It was a big mistake for him to pander to Trumpists rather than focus on turning out his base. With that said, he was probably doomed regardless.

[IceSpear]

Sounds like Braun won by 10 pats.

By even bigger than this : by 11 points.

   Mike Braun   Republican    1,120,895    51.39%
   Joe Donnelly   Democratic    971,563    44.55%

Donnelly actually was losing by double digits for a while. Somehow some Indiana counties take days to report results.  There's still nothing from Porter County on either NYT or CNN, lol.

[IceSpear]

If you guys are still wondering why Porter county is out... check out this sh**tshow - 25 tweeted long mind you.

https://twitter.com/varin/status/1060937524040884224?s=19

Good thing this race wasn't in question. Could you imagine if it went from Braun up 5 on election night to Donnelly squeaking out a victory a few days later? lol

[IceSpear]

Also on the same point, just like regardless of whether not Mike Coffman and Barbara Comstock had hugged Trump or punched him in the face they were more than likely going to lose because of hostile demographics and the surge of anti-GOP turnout in those districts. The same applies to the likes of Donnelly, McCaskil and Heitkamp because they were facing hostile demographics in an election where Trump managed to turn out his base. Either way they would have lost and probably lost more if they had gone down that path of embracing the party's new position on this issue.

I have to wonder what would've happened if Kavanaugh never became a thing. Like, Trump nominates a relatively uncontroversial judge like Gorsuch that McCaskill and Donnelly unceremoniously vote for. Maybe it wouldn't have been enough for them to win, but maybe they would've been the nailbiters we were expecting them to be. And it probably would've saved Bill Nelson (assuming he loses.)